Corporations and other entities typically are sophisticated consumers of legal services. Such entities frequently use request-for-proposal (RFP) processes to obtain legal services. These processes generally are managed manually. Typically the customer will send out a set of instructions to service providers. The set of instructions indicate how the service providers should respond to the RFP. A service provider can then submit written responses to the RFP that include information on how the service provider would perform the requested work and the rates it would charge for such work. The customer then typically compares the submitted proposals manually. This manual process of submission and comparison suffers from a number of inefficiencies. For example, legal service providers who submit proposals in response to an RFP may not format their proposals or otherwise provide the fee proposal and other information in the manner the customer might expect. In turn, if service providers do not provide information in a consistent format, the comparison of the submitted proposals is not easily facilitated. The entities that conduct these RFP processes often then spend significant time following-up with the legal service providers to obtain correct information and/or to translate manually the provided information from the proposals into a consistent format.
Further, because proposals are submitted separately, calculating detailed comparisons of various metrics between the fee data that is submitted can be cumbersome and time consuming. In addition, there typically is no efficient and centralized means to provide written answers to questions service providers may have about an RFP. Instead, such questions typically are communicated to the customer on an ad hoc basis. For each such question, the customer will have to decide whether the answer to the question should be communicated to only the service provider asking the question or to all of the service providers and then individually provide the answer to each such service provider.
Moreover, it is often the case that receiving proposals that are submitted in response to an RFP is only the first step in the RFP process. After receiving the proposals from the legal service providers, many customers for legal services go back to one or more of the legal service providers in order to let them know how one or more aspects of their respective proposals compared against other proposals. This is done in an effort to elicit a more competitive proposal from that provider. Typically, however, the service provider does not have any direct means to see how key metrics of its proposal compare against corresponding key metrics of competing proposals. The service provider, therefore, is only prompted to update its proposal based upon the limited information that is typically provided to the service provider by the customer. Because the service providers likely only have limited information about changes their competitors are willing to make to their proposals, each service provider often has limited reason to update its proposal.
Manually managing such an RFP process is typically time consuming. Although there are automated tools for managing an RFP process, such tools typically are not well-adapted for use by corporations and other entities in connection with complex and/or sophisticated legal projects. For example, such RFP tools typically assume that all potential bidders are essentially the same and typically are configured to award the project to the bidder that has proposed the lowest price. Such a simplistic decision calculus often is not appropriate for complex and sophisticated legal projects.